Meerkat Mail

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Read Meerkat Mail with your class and show them the interactive features where your class can pull out and read Sunny's postcards to his family. Once you've got all your students on board with this great story, introduce some of these resources into your teaching to extend your students' learning. An innovated version might involve Sunny trying to find a home at the seaside, in the supermarket, at an indoor play area – choose a place that will be familiar to the children. Or, if you would like to provide a little more challenge, you could also change the main character to another animal. This would mean that children’s versions could draw on information gained in their research. The written stories could then be made into a whole class book and included in the book area, read aloud in a story-share or recorded as a podcast. 6 Develop context & understanding

An ideal unit of work to cover a short 5 week term. Based on the try use prove method, with Pie Corbett talk for writing. These plans are easily adaptable for a single year group, Y1 or Y2. Each plan is for 2 weeks, but would be easily extended to 3 weeks each for a longer term with extra grammar lessons or short burst writes.

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Take photos of Sunny at the local park, eating something, in different weather, etc. Share these images with the children, explaining they where taken on Sunny’s latest adventure. Model writing a postcard from Sunny to his family, using the information headings to structure the content. The children can then conduct a guided tour of the school with Sunny, taking photos of him in different places, answering any questions he may have and ‘helping’ him join in activities. The children can then write their own postcard from Sunny about his trip to their school. 4 Did you know?

What does this book teach you about meerkats? Use this information (along with your own research) to create a report about them. Absolutely loved this book! Meerkat Mail is a wonderful picture book highlighting, for me, the importance of home and family and how nothing will ever come close no matter how hard you try (bless Sunny!) The thought put into this book is amazing and is definitely worth sharing with children. The title of the book uses alliteration. Can you make up other potential book titles that also use alliteration?Introduce Sunny – either through an image or a meerkat stuffed toy, it will be a good investment! Read the whole text using a visualiser to amplify the images on your IWB. The illustrations convey as much as the text, and children can be helped to understand events, feelings, character details and motivations by close reading of both. Launch your topic with a visit from a wild animal sanctuary (meerkats included, if possible). Discuss and record what the children know about these particular animals and support them in preparing their questions for the visit. Immerse the children in visual images and film clips if there is no animal sanctuary near to you and then role-play a wild animal expert for the children to ‘hot-seat’. Using this Empty Suitcase Activity your students can draw what they think Sunny the Meerkat would need on his travels around the world. This task gets your class thinking about what items they believe would be essential for travel and what they would like to take. This worksheet provides your students with a sense of independence as they make choices for Sunny. This activity is also a great drawing task and will help develop your students' fine motor skills and allows them to get creative.

Sunny thinks that his home is too hot. Can you find out the current temperature where you live? How would you describe this? Carry out some role-play activities with ‘Sunny’ in which he explores how he is feeling at different points in the story. Spring 2/ Summer 1 - Growing/Minibeasts - Aaaarrgghh, Spider! Once There were Giants - Celebrations This is an entertaining and humourous account of Sunny the Meerkat's journey to visit his relatives. Similar in content (if not in style) to the story Marsupial Sue Book and CD, the story explores the differences between the related animals. We liked learning about the various animals and their habitats and we loved reading the postcards. Overall, we really enjoyed reading this book together. An exciting and interactive picture book that brings children on a journey alongside Sunny the Meerkat to find out where he belongs. Although, other picture books focus around telling stories like this with animals, the way that Gravett presents the narrative through postcards aids in making this story unique and exciting.I loved everything about this book. Gravett had a great concept and it was executed wonderfully. The postcards hold the interest of younger and older children/readers and the detailed illustrations are both accurate to the biome, intriguing, and add an element of humor to the story. There are lots of really good aspects to this book: the fun illustrations, the great "realistic" postcards, the information garnered from reading the descriptions from the postcards, the cute "postmarks" and the sweet ending. As the teacher read the book to the children she asked them questions such as ‘what do you think will happen next?’ and ‘how do you think he is feeling here?’. This encourages the children to think more deeply and engage with the story which should help them when they come to do the following tasks.